More Soarin'

Well, what the heck. I'm still working on Soarin'. My first order of business after the last post was adding the pairs of columns that support each theater. I then textured the screen with the blue lighting scheme Disney uses during loading and unloading. I had to reproduce that look, since there aren't any photos of the whole screen due to its insane size, and the light is poor in there anyway. So I collected reference photos and then put together this image in Photoshop from scratch:



Pretty close, n'est-ce pas? I UV-mapped this to the domed screens and set up their material so that lights in the model wouldn't affect it. (With this setup, you can also see the image from the back of the screen, which is how the screen actually is in real life, or so I'm told.) I also added the black walls that surround the screen, and rudimentary versions of the walls of part of the queue between the two screens. The floor of the loading areas received some preliminary texturing - a shiny, off-white concrete look - and I also built the lower floor next to and under the screens, which I believe is a shiny black. You can see all these changes in this render:



But that's not all, folks. See, I started getting this hankering to add a rather important part of the attraction: the ride vehicles themselves. Although the US patent office has some pretty interesting schematics of the hang gliders, they're not quite the same as the ones Disney built for the attractions, so I found appropriate photos and more or less traced over them in 3D. Now all the vehicles sit in place as they should. I did cheat a little, though...two of the rows in each theater are supposed to have nine seats instead of ten, but to keep things simpler, I just squeezed those same ten seats to be a little narrower. I'm lazy! =P

The other changes visible in this render are the safety railing along the front of the loading area and a large grid texture applied on top of the concrete-looking floor. Luckily, I was able to reuse a grid image I'd made for some other texture in the main model, so, in the words of a certain famous button, "that was easy!"



What won't be easy, however, is adding all the machinery above the vehicles that lifts them up toward the screen. No idea if I'll even make an attempt at that. However, I would like to set up a basic animation so that the vehicles will levitate up into their appropriate positions. More on that as things progress.

Inside Soarin' over California

Well, the main model has just gotten so clogged due to ironwork and large images and so forth that I've been taking a bit of a break from it. The good news is that I've done some digital painting instead, which has been fun, and now I've started the interior of Soarin' in a different file, just for kicks. This is especially helpful because I've been slowly developing an alternate concept for the exterior, queue, and loading area.

Now, I'm working from blurry blueprints of the WDW version, so if I start getting too detailed, there are bound to be mistakes, but the interiors of both versions' main show buildings are identical in size and shape, so everything I've got so far should be pretty spot-on. One thing I'm not too confident in, however, is the shape of the screen. The overall scale and curvature are correct, and I THINK the bottom half is totally spot-on, but I'm not positive about the way the edges bend forward at the top. If you've got photos, blueprints, personal observations, or anything else that might help me understand the shape of the screens more completely, your help would be greatly appreciated. =D





Notice how the two theaters are just mirror images of each other. The queue will run between them and then along their outer edges. You can already see the long, rectangular structures that I believe house the projectors.

One thing I've learned already is that the Anaheim version is half underground! I never really thought about the fact that you enter the building at ground level and then continually descend a lot of ramps until you enter the loading area. But seeing the blueprints made it obvious that nearly half the building's height is below ground level. (This is not the case in the Epcot version, however, which is located all aboveground.) In fact, when you first walk into the building, half of each screen is lower than the level where you are.

Anyway, I'm done with Pirates or anything. I just need some time to mull over how I'm gonna coerce my machine into handling the ever-increasing complexity of the model.